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Saturday, 16 April 2016

Social cognition and the death of the inner voice

During a lively discussion at the most recent class on the
subject of participatory sense-making, I cited Fred’s paper as an example of
the kind of dynamic social phenomena that the theory of PSM seems to well
describe.

The paper provides a detailed and persuasive account of the
voice, and the act of speaking, as an integral part of language and languaging
rather than a peripheral and non-salient aspect that is attributed to it by
modern linguistics, which assumes phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics to be worthy, and the rest (literally) is noise.

Joint-speaking seems to have some interesting properties and
cognitive science has little to say on the matter. It appears to act as a
bridge between the between the inner world of the self and the outer world of
the other. The Cartesian dualism that is the axiomatic bedrock of human
sciences seems to vanish before our eyes. When we chant slogans together in the
stands of a football match, sing in harmony in a choir, or respond in unison to
the urgings of a brilliant orator at a rally, the world out there and the world
in here do not seem to have the same purchase, its power seems to temporarily dissipate as we are subsumed in a collective dynamic energy. Gazing into the
future and ruminating on the past that are such features of ourselves as
unified discrete "I"'s are forgotten at that moment. Descartes has lost his
power. The inner voice is dead.

And yet it is this inner voice, the reassertion of the mind
/ world dichotomy that provides the platform to keep in check the power the
madding crowd. The ferocious energy of the collective can be directed and
misdirected. In the context of where and when joint-speaking is observed, a
litany of problems can be identified. Here and Here are small examples of the power of collective
speaking and the hateful abuse that, while certainly not synonymous with the
act of joint speaking, are no strangers to it.

When the energy of the collective is accessed, through joint
speaking or other means, direction of it and dissention from it are often most
powerfully articulated through the outward expression of an inner voice. It is
the introspection of the individual and the commitment of that introspection to
writing that can act as a counter-balancing force.

So what to make of this relationship between the energy of the
collective and the power of the inner voice? Vygotsky thought of the inner
voice as the internalisation of socially learned languaging, “In Piaget’s view,
[inner speech] arises from the inadequate socialization of what is initially an
individual form of speech. In our view, it arises from the inadequate
individualization of the initially social speech, from the inadequate isolation
and differentiation of egocentric from social speech.” So the inner voice grows
out of social cognition, and “the characteristics of egocentric speech do not
atrophy…they strengthen and grow…they follow a rising not a falling curve”. So
we have this continually shifting emphasis; it is only through social cognition that we learn language, the internalisation of this process results in the
emergence and strengthening of the inner voice, seat of the Cartesian dualism,
dynamically intertwined social phenomena such as joint-speaking seems to
comatose this inner voice and unleash the powerful collective energy of the
crowd, and it is through the reassertion of the inner voice in writing that the
social excesses created by the energy of the crowd can be checked.

The opposition of a Cartesian separation between mind and world, and breaking down of the barrier between self and other is a false dichotomy. We are obliged to inhabit both of these paradigms.